15 rising star employees at SAP that are becoming its next crop of power players

Business Insider/Julie Bort
SAP's competitors like to paint the world's largest maker of business applications as an old stodgy company. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently called SAP a "dinosaur," for example.

But to the company's 75,600 worldwide employees in more than 130 countries, nothing could be further from the truth.

They see a company with its fair share of young, brilliant leaders.

Here's a short list of some of the behind-the-scenes rising star leaders at SAP, some of whom lead jet-setting lives, others who are creating brilliant technologies, still others who are world-class athletes.

All of them want to change the world and think SAP is the place for them to do it.

Carlos Diaz: Jet-setting futurist

Carlos Diaz Perez, 41, is the head of Innovation in SAP EMEA South in Madrid.

He describes his job like this: "I help customers imagining a brighter future. I bring knowledge about how technology can help them achieve what looks like magic."

He teaches folks about tech like beacons, drones, predictive analysis, sensors, artificial intelligence, and so on. He says his super power is that he's "extremely good at predictions."

For instance, he wrote a book in 2008 that predicted the rise of China called "Are you ready for China?"

He leads quite the jet setting life, too, traveling between the US, Mexico, Romania, and Waldorf, and he always travels with a suitcase full of physical books, which he calls "the ultimate source of inspiration."

2/

Jared Coyle: The Navy Seal of tech support

Jared Coyle
Jared Coyle

Jared Coyle, 29, joined SAP two years ago as part of the Mission Critical Support team as a De-Escalation Architect.

He says his job is like being on "a team of highly technical Navy Seals" who parachute in to fix a customer's most difficult tech support problems.

In his short time at SAP, he' already gained international attention for creating a recently patented tool called Easy Note. It will save SAP $40 million a year.

It's a way to test out software changes by "faking" the installation of the change to verify it will work before it's installed. He worked with people from the SAP Fellowship program and SAP Autism at Work to create it.

He says there's joy "in solving the seemingly unsolvable" problems, and he's done that with in his personal life, completing a PhD in Quantum Organic Optoelectronics.

His love of optics includes a love of photography, "However, I am colorblind. So I have to use mathematics to do the color balancing."

3/

Rouven Morato: Chief business analyst and family man

Rouven Morato
Morato Adam Rouven

Rouven Morato Adam, 38, is doing a job he describes as "chief analytics officer," leading an eat-your-own-dog-food team of about 350 people launched about a year ago.

It uses SAP's analytics to help SAP analyze and run its own business, while also demonstrating how the tech can be used for customers (something SAP calls the Digital Boardroom).

Adam started at SAP Germany straight from grad school several years ago and quickly worked his way up to becoming the youngest CFO at SAP ever. He was doing the CFO job for two SAP regions, Germany and the Middle/Eastern Europe.

After two years of nothing but work he made the hard decision to quit so he could spend more time with his family, taking a full six month leave (he has three kids).

Quitting meant "not 100% knowing what the impact was to my career but I had to set a priority and it was clear that this was my family," he told us.

But his boss understood his choice and helped him land his current job, a role that's equally powerful but gives him better work/life balance, he says.

4/

V. R. Ferose: A world leader in inclusion

VR Ferose
VR Ferose

V. R. Ferose, 41, became the managing director of SAP Labs India at age 33.

By age 36, he had a staff of 5,000, was traveling the world, meeting celebrities and millionaires, and landing multiple promotions and corporate awards. Then his son was born and diagnosed with autism.

He also founded the India Inclusion Summit "to spread awareness on the topic on inclusion. We hope to reach 10 million people by 2020," he says.

Ferose was recently promoted again and moved to the US to run SAP's worldwide Globalization Services organization (1200+ employees), ensuring SAPs products work well in 130 countries.

He's a major book lover and collector of signed rare books ("I have more than 3000 of them."). He also pens a blog on topics like leadership, books and inclusion, and he's co-authored a book called "Gifted" of inspiring stories of people with disabilities.

5/

Kate Morgan: Creating a new kind of high school

"We have a focus on local grant giving, early college high schools, and employee volunteerism. Our largest volunteer program is our Month of Service. This year we had over 7,500 employees volunteer in North America," she describes.

But Morgan is best known throughout SAP for helping to create a new kind of high school, where students graduate with a diploma and an Associate's Degree in a STEM field.

She's helped launch four schools, called BTECH, in New York, Vancouver, Oakland, and Boston.

"These schools represent a unique partnership between high schools, local colleges, and SAP," she says.

6/

Sue Berry: Giving apps to the people

SAP Sue Berry
Sue Berry

Sue Berry, 41, is a Product Manager who leads mobile innovations at SAP in the Bay Area and globally.

She gained notice for developing a tool that lets business people quickly write their own mobile and web apps without knowing how to code. Berry built it using an open-source visual editor (Google Blockly) and a child development tool (MIT's Scratch).

"Professional programmers are few in number and expensive and often can't keep up with demand. The code-less toolkit puts the power in the hands of the business expert," she says.

When not developing products, or developing tools that let others write their own apps, she's hanging with her two-year-old daughter, running, hiking, kickboxing, or playing music.

"I play the piano and this is one of the rare occasions I am offline," Berry tells us.

7/

Jaehun Jeong: Star app designer

Jaehun Jeong
Jaehun Jeong

Jay Jeong, 34, is rising star app designer, who has been winning national awards for his work.

For instance, Jeong created an Apple Watch app called "Perfect Meeting" that lets you tap into your customer database software and set up a meeting in 5 seconds.

It earned him corporate-wide raves when SAP execs used it during the company's huge annual Sapphire Now conference.

Another app, SAP Consumer Insights 365, won a gold User Experience Award in 2014. It analyzes data from mobile carriers to give companies graphs and charts about mobile user demographics.

"I discover design problems in very early stage of the project," Jeong says. He then solves those problems by working with all the stakeholders, app users, developers, and project managers.

8/

Rachel Chung: Teaching girls to be confident

Rachel Chung
Rachel Chung

Rachel Chung, 22, is just a intern at SAP's Palo Alto offices, but she's already gained the attention of SAP bigwigs.

She's on the SAP University Alliances team, which gets the nation's top universities to use SAP technologies. She helped organize a SAP hackathon/designathon called "InnoJam."

She says adolescent girls often enter a period she calls "losing voice," where they start leaning out from leadership roles.

"I lived on the road in an RV" for a summer, she says, funded by a successful Kickstarter campaign. "In 14 weeks, across 30 states, through 50+ workshops, and with many miles driven, our Girls Driving for a Difference team reached 1200+ middle school girls."

She'll be sharing the curriculum at SXSW 2016.

She also designs eyewear as founder of Pair Eyewear, which makes customizable prescription glasses for children.

9/

Gerrit Simon Kazmaier: Young executive on the rise

Gerrit Simon Kazmaier
Gerrit Simon Kazmaier

Gerrit Simon Kazmaier, 32, is a development vice president based in Vancouver, with about 500 people reporting to him.

Kazmaier is "leading a development team across several locations that develops applications to make sense out of data," he describes.

For instance, his team is working on Cloud for Analytics that was just launched a couple of weeks ago, one of SAP's bigger product announcements this year.

He's getting such a reputation internally that he was recently asked to share his best practices advice at the company's all hands broadcast. Kazmaier calls his accomplishments "the usual." They include "some prizes in university, some patents, maybe one bigger thing: the Hasso Plattner Founders Award."

That's the biggest, most prestigious internal company award a person or team can win.

10/

Prakash Darji: General manager at age 34

Prakash Darji
Prakash Darji

Prakash Darji, 34, is the senior vice president and general manager of SAP's Platform As A Service unit.

His career started in consumer manufacturing. That's when he first used SAP's products. He later joined SAP as a consultant, then a full-time employee working in all sorts of rolls, from engineering roles, to finance M&A deals, to sales.

His career took off when he was asked to lead sales for SAP's super important in-memory database HANA. "We built a team to grow this business from zero to over $1 billion within a few short years," he says.

Darji has two secret weapons for his success. He takes every chance to learn about other jobs roles. "I always took opportunities to spend a 'day in the life of' [studying] multiple roles," he says.

The second is creativity which he keeps alive through his love of music. (He studied music in college.) He was also so into swing dancing for a while that he was president of the Swing Dance Society.

11/

Estelle Berdel: Helping SAP find new business opportunities

Estelle Berdel
Estelle Berdel

Estelle Berdel, 27, currently works in SAP's Business Engineering department in Germany, where she helps identify new business opportunities.

She's also in grad school working on a masters degree in "organizing for innovation."

She became known as a rock star when she and several coworkers created something called heat mapping, which is a way to watch people's smartphones, then analyze human behavior by seeing how crowds move through a venue.

The project was a finalist for the Hasso Plattner Founder's Award.

"Having an entrepreneurial mindset, me and the team, we all like to dream big," she says.

12/

Carolina Darski: Internet of Things inventor

Carolina Darski
Carolina Darski

Carolina Darski, 22, is part of the development team at the SAP Latin America LABS in Sao Leopoldo, Brazil, working on innovations for Internet of Things.

For instance, during a Lab hackathon, she and a team of co-workers developed a baby outfit with smart sensors.

"If the baby has a fever, has a faster heartbeat, or is in the wrong position, it sends an alert to the parent's application on their cellphones," she says.

It also collects historical data that can be shared with the baby's doctor. The project was shown off to customers during a SAP conference in Brazil earlier this year. She's also working on projects that apply IoT tech in other ways, such as to create invoices using sensors, to track a product's location, and to make fleet vehicles safer and more efficient.

13/

Robert Wetzold: An endless fountain of tech creativity

Robert Wetzold
Robert Wetzold

Robert Wetzold, 35, is a developer running the team responsible for the user interface for the SAP's HANA Cloud Platform.

That's a big job but he earned worldwide fame within the company in 2012 when he won an internal hackathon for a tool called "Networking Lunch."

It "shuffles employees together for lunch to learn more about other parts of the company. It was hugely successful and is by now available in nearly all SAP locations worldwide," he says.

He also holds a handful of patents and has developed free software like the financial analysis tool called Fibotrader.

In his free time, he sings in a pop band and codes video games. He just built one for the virtual reality headset Oculus rift "where you have to fight zombies using your hands using a Leap Motion sensor."

14/

Felicia Shafiq: Inspiring others with her Olympic dreams

Felicia Shafiq
Felicia Shafiq

Felicia Shafiq, 35, is a senior support engineer in product support, but it's what she does away from work that makes her a rock star.

Shafiq is a member of the Canadian 2016 Olympic Paralympic women's volleyball team.

The team won a bronze medal in the Toronto Parapan Game, which qualified it to play in Brazil. She's got one more round of qualifying to do, she tells us, before she knows if she's made the Olympic team or not. Selection happens in May.

"So at this point, along with the rest of my team, I am an Olympic Hopeful," she says.

Shafiq lost both of her legs a few years ago due to illness and now walks with prosthetics. She got involved in sitting volleyball thanks to her therapist.

"She new I loved volleyball before I lost my legs and that I played recreationally," Shafiq says. "I was devastated by the fact that I couldn't play again, or so I thought."

Her therapist introduced her to a team member.

"I decided to try it and found that I loved it just as much as standing volleyball. I attended a selection camp six months ago, made the team, and my life hasn't been the same since. We've been to Germany and the UK, and won bronze," she says.

Through SAP's volunteer program, Shafiq now spends her time teaching kids with disabilities to play sitting volleyball.

She's also good at Call of Duty, Foosball, and building stuff. "I have a diamond tufted headboard in the works," she tells us.

15/

Patrick Viesti: A model of young success for the Autism community

Patrick Viesti
Patrick Viesti

Patrick Viesti, 30, is an IT Project manager and member of SAP's Autism at work program.

He graduated Cum Laude with a B.A. in Communications and high honors, but then struggled to find a job after graduation.

"I eventually learned about SAP's Autism at Work Program and became not only a part of it, but a major representative for it," he tells us.

For instance, he spoke at the United Nations in April at their World Autism Awareness Day, telling his personal story.

SAP has committed to hire 1% of workforce from people on the autistic spectrum.

"The opportunity that SAP has granted me has changed my life," he tells us. "For the first time, I can support myself financially. I feel that I have a purpose when I wake up in the morning and that I am making a difference when I help my co-workers on their projects."

"I travel out to California on business, working with our fellow SAP colleagues in Palo Alto and experiencing new opportunities that I could only have dreamed of," he says.